DAVID MARCUS: Why we must make poetry manly again

Throughout English-speaking history, up until about 50 years ago, there had always been men famous in their day for writing beautiful poetry, from William Shakespeare, to Lord Byron, to Robert Frost. Yet sadly today, our society does not see the poet as a manly figure at all.

This erasure of male voices in poetry was not an accident. Like so many of our society’s woes, it was created by a leftist elite in the academy and publishing who thought that women’s voices had been too long ignored, and men’s too widely celebrated.

Suddenly, over the past year, we have seen a slew of articles and think pieces asking, what happened to the literary man? 

What happened, more or less, was a disastrous decision to tell young men there is nothing masculine about literature, and especially not about poetry.

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This notion that the literary arts are somehow feminine in nature is ahistorical nonsense. Going back to King David, strong men have closed their eyes in search of a muse of fire that could ascend the brightest heavens of invention.

The zenith of manly poetry may well have come in World War I, in which endless time in the trenches produced literary gold from Siegfried Sassoon, Joyce Kilmer, Wilfried Owen and Robert Graves, among hundreds of others. 

Take this section from from Graves’ masterpiece, ‘The Next War’

Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage

Once more with pomp and greed and rage;

Courtly ministers will stop

At home and fight to the last drop;

By the million men will die

In some new horrible agony;

And children here will thrust and poke,

Shoot and die, and laugh at the joke,

With bows and arrows and wooden spears,

Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers

Graves had emerged from a tradition of literary men like Rudyard Kipling, whose poems such as ‘If” and “Gunga Din,” were all but an instruction manual for upright masculine behavior, and are still close to the hearts of many men today.

In ‘If’ Kipling urges:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

So what happened? Why do we have no Kipling now? Or even an E.E. Cummings or T.S.Eliot? 

I asked Joseph Massey, one of the few men in poetry today charting a bold course.

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“When I see how postmodernism, as funneled through academia, has neutered poetry, I recall a line from Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass: ‘The expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new… large, rich, and strong.’ Young men, men of all ages, would benefit from absorbing language charged with meaning in a world fractured by fatigue and nihilism.,” he told me.

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Massey would add that poetry is “far from a eunuch’s hobby, despite what’s taught and promoted in MFA programs,” which is exactly right. Poetry is not mere observation or spilling of emotion, it is conquest, a triumph of understanding and reason.

In fact, the masculine urge to write poetry is even more basic than making sense of the world, since we can be all but certain that many of the earliest forms of verse were invented to woo women, and it has a decent track record.

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There is hope that our current drought of poetry is just a blip. Next year, Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” will be released, hopefully spurring young men to read Homer’s original manly poem, and the 250th birthday of America should include celebration of our great poets.

But more than anything else, we must get the notion out of our heads that poetry, and writing, and wondering at the impossible beauty of everything is somehow a low-T activity, because, let’s be real: Very few of us are in a position to test our masculinity against the WWI poets of the trenches.

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You want to raise a good son? Give him Kipling for backbone, Yeats for heart, Eliot for wisdom and Frost for common sense, and he will be fooled by nothing in this world.

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It was the French poet Louis Aragon who wrote, “Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.”

A few ‘men’ he never knew. 

Allow me to leave you with one final thought. It is not merely the fact that our young men do not read poetry that is the problem, it is that they don’t write any. Without that, where will the poor, marvelous words we leave to posterity come from?

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